Jessica Kiang

The grandest irony to emerge is that despite its unquestionable sincerity, soft-spoken iconoclast Martin Margiela’s insistent non-image may yet turn out to be fashion’s canniest bit of image-making of all.

Szumowska...wants to tackle manifold issues, often unrelated to each other, and her attention feels magpie-ish and unsettled.

Gentle Monster is a meticulously plausible depiction of the dissolution of a family under the most trust-annihilating of circumstances, but that is all it is.

The odd rhythm of very fast and slick followed by very slow and arty is difficult to settle into, and the film ultimately frustrates, willfully obscuring the apparatus of what appears at first to be a promising film noir framework.

If the mix of dead-serious themes and playful, why-the-hell-not approach gives off a youthful, almost film-studenty energy, the actual craft is well above amateur-level. Ohs wears well the hats of director, editor and co-writer (alongside the entire cast of four who also get script credit), but especially as cinematographer, he does a sterling job of maximizing a doubtless threadbare budget.

Aloft and its icy landscapes and feel of gently dropping barometric pressure can only distract so far from what is essentially an overwrought melodrama that here and there tips over into heavy-handedness despite the restrained beauty of its images.

Kossakovsky doesn’t anthropomorphize the animals; if anything, he zoomorphizes us.

It’s a heartfelt and undoubtedly well-meaning film, attempting a character study of a woman of an age and lifestyle that makes her an unusual and therefore unusually worthy subject. But Angelique’s overriding characteristic is that she is incapable of fundamental change which makes her at best a frustrating protagonist for this drama.

Censor is a stylish calling card for all involved, one that certainly demonstrates an impressive level of directorial control for a debut filmmaker. But that control does sometimes feel like constriction.

The star that is truly born here is Cooper as a director.

Monsoon is a graceful and truthfully irresolute investigation into the strange, often poignantly unreciprocated relationship that many first- and second-generation emigrants have with the far-off foreign country of the past.

With the actors so convincing in their roles and with Xin especially able to command the screen despite the often miserable un-glamor of her surroundings, the film becomes a rich portrait of a connection that was once so tender and now just revolves in a slowly decaying orbit around the broken axis of his resentment and her guilt.

Even just the rooftop of this vast, scabbed Phnom Penh apartment complex seems to have a thousand stories to tell — it’s perhaps little wonder that Neang’s melancholic, perplexed, slightly ponderous feature debut gets a little lost navigating them.

An utterly bizarre, frequently grotesque, occasionally obscene singularity, Polish artist Mariusz Wilczynski’s abrasive animation Kill It and Leave This Town exists so far outside the realm of the expected, the acceptable and the neatly comprehensible that it acts as a striking reminder of just how narrow that realm can be.

With the themes of this play not exactly subtle or delicate, particularly at the climax, it all becomes a bit grating -- inescapable in its heavy-handedness.

Some occasionally awkward performance moments aside, though, the film is very compassionate towards its characters and finds just about enough original insight within the well-worn family drama genre to keep things from feeling too familiar—it’s a just a shame there couldn’t have been a little more vitality injected early on.

The film is undeniably enjoyable, but its giddy grandiosity only serves to highlight the brittleness of its purported braininess.

This is exhaustingly exhibitionist cinema, that wants to be looked at for the sake of being looked at — for the crispness of its moves, not the complexity of its concepts, and that can get wearying after a while.

The Bastards feels like what happens when an undeniably great filmmaker stoops to sensationalism -- it’s a smarter, odder film than someone else would make with the same material, but it’s still smart, odd sensationalism.

Mona Lisa and the Blood Moon is a blast.

Partly, the balance between gritty, true-life fidelity and pacy, exciting storytelling is achieved because in Rye, to whom Eric Kress’ warm, compassionate camera clings so doggedly, we have such a sympathetic, human protagonist.

Eventually, en route to a finale that strives for tragic poetry the rest of the film scarcely earns, the narrative ice wears so thin that it cracks under the weight of a moment’s thought.

As the movie dances right up to the conventions of this well-worn genre, then deftly slides (To the left! To the right!) to avoid them, you might just find yourself clapping along in spite of it all being terminally uncool. Uncool can be a lot of fun.

Crudely put: it is distancing to hear people cry for help or speak anguished, halting truths from their hearts in a second language, and for all the bruising effectiveness of the filmmaking at times, it’s a distraction which 22 July never quite overcomes.

No matter how pure your intentions nor how real your pain, these ancient myths all teach us, debts always come due, and the chilling denouement of Jóhannsson’s dark, deliberate debut suggests that is what Lamb is: a modern-day take on some ancient, pre-Disneyfication fairy tale or a nursery rhyme with a sinister history encoded into its Spartan melody.

However much fun the film’s high points may afford, there is also something faintly depressing about seeing a once-inventive filmmaker plunder his own legacy for easy props.

There is nothing underneath the glossy surface and no real insight into what made this man tick — and despite how creepy he looks here, Bulger was a man, not a devil.

Shot in pedestrian fashion, it is set in an intriguing and entirely foreign milieu, but the film ends up just too inscrutable and oblique for us to really engage with it, or its often incomprehensibly motivated characters.